Agile

Agile does not enforce rigid processes, but organizations typically choose a guiding framework and a set of practices that serve as the starting point of an agile transformation. Executives typically want to know where teams are in terms of adopting these new ways of working. This article provides three techniques--individual, team and group--that can be used to assess the agile adoption level, monitor progress and drive improvements.

Find answers to these questions and more in this Agile Practice Area. If you are new to Agile, take advantage of the resources below and don't be shy about commenting or asking questions. If you're a seasoned pro, help others out and become an influencer. We welcome contributions from all sources and the more you participate, the more visible you become. Let us help you move down the road from "giver of sage advice" to "Thought Leader".

Upcoming Webinars

Do you often find that when something fails in production, the response of a development team member is, “It works on my machine or at our end, you must be having the wrong version“? Vice Versa on the other side of the table – do you find that the operations team always feels that the developers are not sensitive to the operational requirements and constraints?
If so, does that mean we are just developing software not a working system ? Are we just working in Silos ?
DevOps aims at breaking the Silos and bringing in a culture of everyone “getting along”.
Presenter Priya Patra disucsses how and why DevOps is the force behind the evolution where the development team and operations works together with business sponsors and quality assurance (QA) to deliver software that can be released to production at any point of time.

This webinar will review the derivatives and dynamics of change in Organizations, defining how some companies that follow the Agile and Open operating models maintain high levels of performance while remaining very adaptable and progressive to new opportunity.

In this unrehearsed call, Joseph Flahiff will coach Liza Wood through the issue she decides to bring. Joseph has done no preparation, and does not know the problem that Liza is going to bring. This is just what it is like when team member comes to a coach for a 1:1 session.

Save Time With Tools + Templates

The Risk Management Grid is a technique to identify potential risk events that could impact one of more of the project’s Seven Win Conditions. Importantly, it also serves to decide how those events will be prevented or mitigated.

Win Conditions address how success will be measured. How do you stack up when it comes to stakeholder satisfaction, your schedule, scope, quality, budget, ROI and team satisfaction? This template helps you rank priorities, and provides areas for metrics and descriptions.

Learn From Others

Have you ever entered a sprint taking on a user story that you later regretted? What can be done to prevent this frustration? Is there a technique that will prevent this from happening, or are these teams doomed to keep repeating their mistakes?

Some people see agile projects as knowledge transfer deserts where information is hoarded by key individuals and no useful documentation produced. Others believe agile projects are all about knowledge transfer. So why the disagreement? How can smart, experienced people have such different views about the same topic?

How many of us start a project thinking that we understood the reason behind doing the project in the first place? There’s about half of us who never aligned the project’s mission with the overall department or company vision, resulting in poorly made decisions--and possibly a breakdown in team morale. Providing a project focus that supports a larger purpose is particularly important for fast-paced, adjusting agile projects.

Question: After a recent conversion by my team regarding agile, we find that there is a mismatch between the number of hours we should have for working on stories and the amount of time we really have. So we are constantly over-committing to our Product Owner and not delivering. Where are we going wrong?

A.

Traditional teams may have a 15-20% contingency cushion in time and cost on their project estimates. Routinely subtract a similar agile contingency from the number of backlog items you accept to make sure you finish all planned work within a single iteration.

B.

Agile is expected to be flexible, and velocity can vary. Just complete what you can and adjust your velocity for the next sprint if you don’t finish all of the stories you committed to complete this time.

C.

Be sure you are acknowledging hours that team members will spend in Scrum ceremonies, personal time commitments and non-team directed organizational work before calculating the capacity for this iteration.

D.

Ask the ScrumMaster to speak to anyone on the team who did not finish his or her work during the previous iteration. This person is making the team look bad and should be disciplined if it happens again.

In agile, we often think of having an experimental mindset where we try something, measure the results, retrospect and replan. We need to do that for our projects. And, as agile leaders, we need to do even more. We need to have the agile mindset.

How do we define quality as a project manager? Is it managing a project really well, or managing a successful project? How about managing a successful project really well? That sounds pretty good. However, it poses the next question: What is a successful project? Let’s look at some examples of project success, failure and ambiguity.

Successful agile development requires that people collaborate in self-organizing their own work. Being told how to do that is counterproductive, yet waiting for them to discover agile practices that work can take a very long time, perhaps forever. What’s a manager to do?

As an experienced agile coach, this writer often gets asked about agile tactics and practices--what works and what doesn’t. There are no singular answers, but there are some generative behaviors and rules for agile done well. In this article, he explores a set of common anti-patterns that he sees in an effort to share what not to do in your agile journey.